From the first day Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed up on the national political scene, I’ve reminisced about what a dreadful teacher she was. In post after post, I’ve noted that, while she was very nice (she is a nice lady in a one-on-one), she was totally incoherent as a teacher. She never could seem to finish a thought before bouncing on to the next, apparently random, thought that popped up in her brain. Sometimes she didn’t even bother finishing sentences.

New senator Elizabeth Warren was asked by a Boston reporter the other day, “when you mention ‘middle class,’ what numbers are we talking about, in terms of income level?” The next Senate supposed financial-industry wonk first asserted, “It’s not a numbers issue. I know you’d expect a very wonky answer for me, you know, about the percentiles.”

[snip]

The reporter then pointed out to Warren that, when it comes to bills like the legislation surrounding the fiscal cliff, defining the middle class does indeed involve numbers — how, exactly, did the president just supposedly shield middle-class Americans from tax increases if it is not possible to say, on the basis of income levels or percentiles, whom that group includes?

Warren then goes off on a completely unrelated tangent, saying, “When we strengthen education, when we make it possible for kids to go to college, then we strengthen America’s middle class, and that doesn’t need a dollar figure.” This is a problematic statement: If we offer more subsidies to all Americans of any income level who’d like to attend college, and to the colleges themselves (as Warren would surely like, rather than means-testing college loans and savings programs or spending less on university compensation), then that is actually unlikely to “strengthen America’s middle class” — the benefits will accrue mostly to the upper-income Americans who already win most of the slots to America’s pricey private universities and flagship state schools, and to the upper-middle-class Americans who staff them, ossifying, not eroding, America’s inequality.

Pure Warren: superficial, muddled, obfuscatory, and tangential. That she’s considered a shining star in the Democrat firmament is scary and depressing.